The Pentagon’s Spending Spree

China just launched a refitted Ukrainian aircraft carrier from the 1990s on its first test run — and that’s what the only projected
“great power” enemy of the U.S. has to offer for the foreseeable
future. In the meantime, the U.S. Navy has 11 aircraft carrier task
forces to cruise the seven seas and plans to keep that many through 2045.
Like so much else, when it comes to the American military, all
comparisons are ludicrous. In any normal sense, the United States
stands alone in military terms. Its expenditures make up almost 50 percent of global military spending; it dominates the global arms market; and it has countless more bases, pilotless drones, military bands, and almost anything else military you’d care to mention than does any other power.

In other words, comparisons can’t be made. The minute you try,
you’re off the charts. And yet, in purely practical terms, when you
take a shot at measuring what the overwhelming investment of American
treasure in the military, the U.S. intelligence community, the
Department of Homeland Security, and the rest of our national security
establishment has actually bought us, you come up with a series of wars
and conflicts headed nowhere and a series of post-9/11 terror attacks
generally so inept it hardly mattered whether they were foiled or not.

Still, when it comes to cutting the U.S. national security budget,
none of this seems to matter. The Pentagon “cuts” presently being
discussed in Washington are largely in projected future growth,
not in real funds (which continue to rise) — and even then, the
Pentagon and its many boosters in Washington are already crying bloody murder.
Give some credit for all this to the giant weapons-makers and to the
military itself: both have so carefully tied military-related jobs into
so many state economies that few congressional representatives could
afford to vote for the sorts of real cutbacks that would bring perhaps
the most profligate institution on the planet to heel and yet still
leave the country as the globe’s military giant. You want, for
instance, to cut back on that absolutely crucial Navy acrobatic flying
team, the Blue Angels. (What would we all do without dramatic military
flyovers at our major and minor sporting events?) Count on it, hotel keepers in Florida will be on the phone immediately! Add in the veneration of American soldiers, and you have a fatal brew when it comes to serious budget cutting.

How Safe Are You?

What almost $8 trillion in national security spending bought you by Chris Hellman

The killing of Osama bin Laden did not put cuts in national security
spending on the table, but the debt-ceiling debate finally did. And mild
as those projected cuts might have been, last week newly minted
Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta was already digging in his heels and
decrying the modest potential cost-cutting plans as a “doomsday mechanism”
for the military. Pentagon allies on Capitol Hill were similarly
raising the alarm as they moved forward with this year’s even larger
military budget.

None of this should surprise you. As with all addictions, once
you’re hooked on massive military spending, it’s hard to think
realistically or ask the obvious questions. So, at a moment when
discussion about cutting military spending is actually on the rise for
the first time in years, let me offer some little-known basics about the
spending spree this country has been on since Sept. 11, 2001, and
raise just a few simple questions about what all that money has
actually bought Americans.

Consider this my contribution to a future 12-step program for national security sobriety.

Let’s start with the three basic post-9/11 numbers that Washington’s addicts need to know:

1. $5.9 trillion: That’s the sum of taxpayer dollars
that’s gone into the Pentagon’s annual “base budget,” from 2000 to
today. Note that the base budget includes nuclear weapons activities,
even though they are overseen by the Department of Energy, but — and
this is crucial — not the cost of our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nonetheless, even without those war costs, the Pentagon budget managed
to grow from $302.9 billion in 2000, to $545.1 billion in 2011. That’s a
dollar increase of $242.2 billion and an 80 percent jump ($163.6 billion and
44 percent if you adjust for inflation). It’s enough to make your head swim,
and we’re barely started.

2. $1.36 trillion: That’s the total cost of the
Iraq and Afghan wars by this Sept. 30, the end of the current
fiscal year, including all moneys spent for those wars by the Pentagon,
the State Department, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and
other federal agencies. Of this, $869 billion will have been for Iraq,
$487.6 billion for Afghanistan.

Add up our first two key national security spending numbers and
you’re already at $7.2 trillion since the 9/11 attacks. And
even that staggering figure doesn’t catch the full extent of Washington
spending in these years. So onward to our third number:

3. $636 billion: Most people usually ignore this
part of the national security budget and we seldom see any figures for
it, but it’s the amount, adjusted for inflation, that the U.S.
government has spent so far on “homeland security.” This isn’t an easy
figure to arrive at because homeland-security funding flows through
literally dozens of federal agencies and not just the Department of
Homeland Security (DHS). A mere $16 billion was requested for homeland
security in 2001. For 2012, the figure is $71.6 billion, only $37
billion of which will go through DHS. A substantial part, $18.1 billion,
will be funneled through — don’t be surprised — the Department of
Defense, while other agencies like the Department of Health and Human
Services ($4.6 billion) and the Department of Justice ($4.1 billion)
pick up the slack.

Add those three figures together and you’re at the edge of $8
trillion in national security spending for the last decade-plus and
perhaps wondering where the nearest group for compulsive-spending
addiction meets.

Now, for a few of those questions I mentioned, just to bring reality further into focus:

How does that nearly $8 trillion compare with past spending?

In the decade before the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon base budget added
up to an impressive $4.2 trillion, only one-third less than for the
past decade. But add in the cost of the Afghan and Iraq wars, and total
Pentagon spending post-9/11 is actually two-thirds greater than in the
previous decade. That’s quite a jump. As for homeland security
funding, spending figures for the years prior to 2000 are hard to
identify because the category didn’t exist (nor did anyone who mattered
in Washington even think to use that word “homeland”). But there can be
no question that whatever it was, it would pale next to present
spending.

Is that nearly $8 trillion the real total for these years, or could it be even higher?

The war-cost calculations I’ve used above, which come from my own organization, the National Priorities Project,
only take into account funds that have been requested by the president
and appropriated by Congress. This, however, is just one way of
considering the problem of war and national security spending. A recent study published by the Watson Institute of Brown University took a much broader approach. In the summary of their work,
the Watson Institute analysts wrote, “There are at least three ways to
think about the economic costs of these wars: what has been spent
already, what could or must be spent in the future, and the comparative
economic effects of spending money on war instead of something else.”

By
including funding for such things as veterans benefits, future costs
for treating the war-wounded, and interest payments on war-related
borrowing, they came up with $3.2 trillion to $4 trillion in war costs,
which would put those overall national security figures since 2001 at
around $11 trillion.

I took a similar approach in an earlier TomDispatch piece in which I calculated the true costs of national security at $1.2 trillion annually.

All of this brings another simple, but seldom-asked question to mind:

Are we safer?

Regardless of what figures you choose to use, one thing is certain:
we’re talking about trillions and trillions of dollars. And given the
debate raging in Washington this summer about how to rein in
trillion-dollar deficits and a spiraling debt, it’s surprising that no
one thinks to ask just how much safety bang for its buck the U.S. is
getting from those trillions.

Of course, it’s not an easy question to answer, but there are some
troubling facts out there that should give one pause. Let’s start with
government accounting, which, like military music, is something of an
oxymoron. Despite decades of complaints from Capitol Hill and various
congressional attempts to force changes via legislation, the Department
of Defense still cannot pass an audit. Believe it or not, it never has.

Members of Congress have become so exasperated that several have
tried (albeit unsuccessfully) to cap or cut military spending until the
Pentagon is capable of passing an annual audit as required by the Chief
Financial Officers Act of 1990. So even as they fight to preserve record
levels of military spending, Pentagon officials really have no way of
telling American taxpayers how their money is being spent or what kind
of security it actually buys.

And this particular disease seems to be catching. The Department of Homeland Security has been part of the “high risk” series
of the Government Accountability Office (GAO) since 2003. In case being
“high risk” in GAO terms isn’t part of your dinner-table chitchat,
here’s the definition: “agencies and program areas that are high risk
due to their vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse, and mismanagement,
or are most in need of broad reform.”

Put in layman’s terms: no organization crucial to national security
spending really has much of an idea of how well or badly it is spending
vast sums of taxpayer money — and worse yet, Congress knows even less.

Which leads us to a broader issue and another question:

Are we spending money on the right types of security?

This June, the Institute for Policy Studies released the latest
version of what it calls “a Unified Security Budget for the United
States” that could make the country safer for far less than the current
military budget. Known more familiarly as the USB, it has been produced
annually since 2004 by the website Foreign Policy in Focus and draws on a task force of experts.

As in previous years, the report found — again in layman’s terms —
that the U.S. invests its security dollars mainly in making war,
slighting both real homeland security and anything that might pass for
preventive diplomacy. In the Obama administration’s proposed 2012
budget, for example, 85 percent of security spending goes to the military (and
if you included the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, that
percentage would only rise); just 7 percent goes to real homeland security and a
modest 8 percent to what might, even generously speaking, be termed
nonmilitary international engagement.

Significant parts of the foreign policy establishment have come to
accept this critique — at least they sometimes sound like they do. As
Robert Gates put the matter
while still Secretary of Defense, “Funding for non-military foreign
affairs programs … remains disproportionately small relative to what we
spend on the military. … [T]here is a need for a dramatic increase in
spending on the civilian instruments of national security.” But if they
talk the talk, when annual budgeting time comes around, few of them yet
walk the walk.

So let’s ask another basic question:

Has your money, funneled into the vast and shadowy world of military and national security spending, made you safer?

Government officials and counterterrorism experts frequently claim
that the public is unaware of their many “victories” in the “war on
terror.” These, they insist, remain hidden for reasons that involve
protecting intelligence sources and law enforcement techniques. They
also maintain that the United States and its allies have disrupted any
number of terror plots since 9/11 and that this justifies the present
staggering levels of national security spending.

Undoubtedly examples of foiled terrorist acts, unpublicized for
reasons of security, do exist (although the urge to boast shouldn’t be
underestimated, as in the case of the covert operation to kill Osama bin
Laden). Think of this as the “I could tell you, but then I’d have to
kill you” approach to supposed national security successes. It’s
regularly used to justify higher spending requests for homeland
security. There are, however, two obvious and immediate problems with
taking it seriously.

First, lacking any transparency, there’s next to no way to assess its
merits. How serious were these threats? A hapless underwear bomber or a
weapon of mass destruction that didn’t make it to an American city?
Who knows? The only thing that’s clear is that this is a loophole through which you can drive your basic mine-resistant, ambush-protected armored vehicle.

Second, how exactly were these attempts foiled? Were they thwarted by
programs funded as part of the $7.2 trillion in military spending, or
even the $636 billion in homeland security spending?

An April 2010 Heritage Foundation report,
“30 Terrorist Plots Foiled: How the System Worked,” looked at known
incidents where terrorist attacks were actually thwarted and so provides
some guidance. The Heritage experts wrote, “Since September 11, 2001,
at least 30 planned terrorist attacks have been foiled, all but two of
them prevented by law enforcement. The two notable exceptions are the
passengers and flight attendants who subdued the ‘shoe bomber’ in 2001
and the ‘underwear bomber’ on Christmas Day in 2009.”

In other words, in the vast majority of cases, the plots we know
about were broken up by “law enforcement” or civilians, in no way aided
by the $7.2 trillion that was invested in the military — or in many
cases even the $636 billion that went into homeland security. And while
most of those cases involved federal authorities, at least three were
stopped by local law enforcement action.

In truth, given the current lack of assessment tools, it’s virtually
impossible for outsiders — and probably insiders as well — to evaluate
the effectiveness of this country’s many security-related programs. And
this stymies our ability to properly determine the allocation of
federal resources on the basis of program efficiency and the relative
levels of the threats addressed.

So here’s one final question that just about no one asks:

Could we be less safe?

It’s possible that all that funding, especially the moneys that have
gone into our various wars and conflicts, our secret drone campaigns and
“black sites,” our various forays into Pakistan, Libya, Yemen, Somalia,
and other places may actually have made us less safe. Certainly, they
have exacerbated existing tensions and created new ones, eroded our
standing in some of the most volatile regions of the world, resulted in
the deaths of hundreds of thousands and the misery of many more, and
made Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, potential recruiting and
training grounds for future generations of insurgents and terrorists.
Does anything remain of the international goodwill toward our country
that was the one positive legacy of the infamous attacks of Sept.
11, 2001? Unlikely.

Chris Hellman, a TomDispatch.com regular, is a senior research analyst at the National Priorities Project
(NPP). He is a member of the Unified Security Budget Task Force and the
Sustainable Defense Task Force. Prior to joining NPP, he worked on
military budget and policy issues for the Center for Arms Control and
Non-Proliferation and the Center for Defense Information. He is also a
10-year veteran of Capitol Hill, where as a congressional staffer he
worked on defense and foreign policy issues.